Business School Rankings – Not As Complicated as They Seem

There are many services that provide rank business schools.  Business Week and the Wall Street Journal, US News are a few names among a host – each with their own methodology to provide them with a claim that they are best.  Some focus purely on salary improvement, some look at a broad mix of indicators, some poll recruiters.  It is quite interesting to see all the different approaches used to tackle the question.  Further you often see significant changes in the rankings over time, as some critical move by one school puts over the top of others.  Our view at 7L Associates is that all of these rankings are bunk. 

At the end of the day, the only people who care about movements in rankings are the people who are applying.  Nowhere in the workforce do you see Vice-Presidents and Directors pouring over the latest results and making their recruiting decisions based upon that.  Neither do headhunters or recruiters.  In the workplace, there are maybe 3 or 4 tiers that business schools can be grouped in, and membership in these tiers changes very rarely.  The grouping of schools in these tiers is pretty much how most people assumed it would be before you started looking at schools.  There are a few programs that have uber-brands (hint, Harvard is one), a few programs that have strong brands in specific areas and a group of programs that are simply known as being high quality.  We’ll cover details about this in future posts.